AGENTLINK UPDATE # 5 --- 23 July 1998 This is the email newsletter of AgentLink -- Europe's Network of Excellence for Agent-based Computing. IMPORTANT: If you are the technical contact point for your node, then it may well be that you are the only member of your organisation receiving the AgentLink update. Please take the time to distribute this mail to other members of your group who may not have received it. If you would like anybody added to this mailing list (not necessarily a member of AgentLink), then please send a request to AgentLink@qmw.ac.uk. If you have a group mail alias, why not ask for this alias to be added to the AgentLink update list? PLEASE NOTE that you cannot reply directly to this mail; send comments questions, etc to AgentLink@qmw.ac.uk. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents: * Introduction * Kick-off meeting of Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce SIG * Kick-off meeting of Intelligent Information Agents SIG * Kick-off meeting of Methodologies/software engineering SIG * Proposal for SIG on Agents in Telecoms ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Introduction This email update gives more details about the kick-off meetings for the AgentLink special interest groups (SIGs) to be held in Brussels on 24 September. If you are active in the area of agents for e-commerce, intelligent information agents, or methodologies/software engineering for agent systems, then you are strongly encouraged to participate! Support will be available for travel for active participants that are members of AgentLink (though support may be limited if too many members apply!) We view SIGs as one of the main ways in which AgentLink will get feedback from its members. If you don't participate, you are passing up a great opportunity to give shape to the future direction of AgentLink, and also to establish contacts and collaborations that could be crucial for your work. This is what AgentLink is all about! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Kick-off meeting of Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce SIG Brussels, September 24, 1998 This first meeting of the Special Interest Group intends to set the scene for the future collaboration among the members of AgentLink interested on the challenges that agent-mediated electronic commerce faces, as well as the opportunities it creates. We expect to bring together specialists from industry and research who will contribute theoretical, methodological and application perspectives in the narrowly focused topic that nevertheless involves wide ranging concerns such as: agent architectures, structure of agent-mediated electronic institutions, economic-theoretic, modelling, legal frameworks, or policy guidelines. The full-day meeting will strive towards an informal atmosphere with plenty of interaction among participants. The discussions should bring into scene the need for practical solutions that might strengthen the European Industry position. This may hopefully initiate discussions to create consortia for the Vth framework programme. The one-day meeting will be organized around two types of activities: * Group presentations. Presentation of the research and development activities on agent-mediated electronic commerce of research laboratories and industrial R&D departments, with special emphasis on the practical results obtained so far. * Panels. In-depth discussion of practical and theoretical aspects of Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce. Two panels are expected: - On Practical challenges. The questions to be addressed by the members of this panel will focus on the practical aspects of the developments of agent-mediated systems for electronic commerce. Which architectures are going to be mainly used? which standards is it necessary to put into action? which role will agent mobility play in electronic commerce? which are the right answers to the issues of security and liability? - On Theoretical challenges. The questions to be addressed by these panelists will refer to the theoretical results that are needed to ensure a safe introduction of agent-mediated systems in everyday electronic commerce practice. Issues like certification of agent behaviour, formal specification of agent-mediated electronic institutions, modelling of agent communication, semantics of agent interaction become crucial. Those willing to contribute to the meeting are required to send a one-page summary of their contribution to Carles Sierra (mailto:sierra@iiia.csic.es) no later than the 1st of September. Contributions can be either a group activities report -with detailed recent activity- or a position to be presented in one of the panels. Multiple contributions, group presentation and panel position, are encouraged. As already announced in the AgentLink electronic Newsletter, no more than 15 AgentLink nodes will get travel support refunded. If more contributions are received, those coming from very active groups or presenting multiple contributions will be selected. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Kick-off meeting of Intelligent Information Agents SIG Brussels, Belgium, September 24 1998, The main aim of this SIG is to promote collaborative projects and cross fertilisation of ideas between academic nodes with similar interests in the research area of intelligent information agents (I2A). This shall be done for example by putting groups with related interests in touch with one-another, and by providing and disseminating information about work of national and international groups and projects in the I2A area. We hopefully will have a very stimulating kick-off meeting of our SIG and hope to welcome as many participants as possible at that meeting. To participate, please send us a short report on your recent activities in R&D of information agents, potential needs for collaboration with other groups in the field. The report should have a format of 1-2 pages (or more, if you like) in plain text or postscript. We would appreciate it very much if you'd like to present some special, interesting research work and/or a running system, prototype or some application of information agents developed by your group. Please note, however, that the kick-off meeting is NOT an academic conference or workshop, and so detailed technical presentations are not appropriate. There will be plenty of time for open discussions, to learn about related work in the I2A field from other groups, and maybe to initiate first contacts for further collaborations. Please send the report or a paper (in plain text or postscript) to be presented, by EMAIL to Matthias Klusch (matilto:klusch@cs.cmu.edu) NOT LATER THAN August 20, 1998. Please indicate, if you want to give your presentation in a short or long talk (20 and 45 minutes, respectively), and your needs of equipment (OHP, Video). If you have any suggestions for an interesting PANEL, some survey talk on a special issue to be given at this meeting, etc., feel free to send us an email! We'll try to meet the demands as best as we . If you need financial support for traveling to the SIG meeting in Brussels, there is a limited possibility to get funded, IF you give a presentation at the meeting (as a member of AgentLink). In this case, please indicate your needs in addition to the report; decision about funding will then be available as soon as possible. If you have further questions, please, do not hesitate to contact us at: Matthias Klusch (coordinator) Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh PA 15213, USA email: klusch@cs.cmu.edu phone: +1-412-268-5287 fax: +1-412-268-5569 Innes Ferguson (co-coordinator) Active On-line Systems Ltd. 13 Grange Park, Flat 4, London W5 3PL, UK email: innes@active-online.net phone: +44-181-579-0598 or +44-958-904197 Looking forward to see you in Brussels! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Kick-off meeting of Methodologies/software engineering SIG It is crucial that the basic principles and lessons of software and knowledge engineering are applied to the development and deployment of multi-agent systems. At present, the majority of existing agent applications are developed in an ad hoc fashion - following little or no rigorous design methodology and with limited specification of the requirements or design of the agents or of a multi-agent system as a whole. To develop methods with which both the requirements on such systems and the systems themselves can be modelled and specified at a conceptually acceptable level of detail, characteristics of real-world multi-agent applications need to be identified, in relation to specific domains. Such specifications describe the semantics of systems without concern for implementation details, providing a basis for verification, validation and testing of the functionality of the systems in the light of the specified requirements. The purpose of this SIG is to focus on these issues. As such, the SIG will bring together a strong sub-community of AgentLink in an area of particular European strength generally. Specific topics to be addressed within this SIG are: - requirements engineering for agent systems; - analysis and design techniques for agent systems; - formal techniques for specification, design, and verification of agent systems; - specific ontologies for agent requirements and agent models; - reuse of agents and agent components; - libraries of generic models of specific types of agents and agent components; - validation and testing techniques - tools to support the agent and multi-agent system development process. The aim of the kick-off meeting for this SIG will be to establish a detailed agenda for the SIG, mapping out the key issues that need to be addressed in order to make agent-based software development a reality, and the key interests and problems of participants. To participate in the SIG, you should send a position statement, which should be at least 2 pages in length. This position paper should state the key issues that you believe need to be addressed in order to realise the vision of agent-based software engineering, and should summarise how your work is addressing these issues. The deadline for submission of position papers will be late August; the final date is to be fixed, and will be announced ASAP. You are encouraged to begin work on preparing your position paper now, and to contact the SIG coordinator (Jan Treur -- contact details below) for more information. The kick-off meeting itself will consist of panel/discussion sessions and presentations by participants. Jan Treur (SIG coordinator) Artificial Intelligence Group Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands Email: treur@cs.vu.nl URL: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~treur Phone: +31.20.4447763 Fax: +31.20.4447653 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Proposal for SIG on Agents in Telecoms Sahin Albayrak (mailto:sahin@cs.tu-berlin.de) is proposing the following SIG, and would be keen to hear from anyone interested in participating in such a SIG's activities. Please email Sahin directly if you are keen! Topic Research and development of agent technology for telecommunications applications and telematics services. Purpose and Goal The main purpose of this SIG is to provide a forum for discussion and collaboration between telecommunications service and network providers, universities and other research institutions as well as European research projects (ACTS, EURESCOM, ...), on the topic of intelligent agents for telecommunications applications and telematics services (IATA). The overall aim of the IATA SIG is to support the rapid and timely of new telecommunications applications and telematics services in the telco industry based on agent technology, and the long-term establishment of agent technology in the telco industry. The IATA SIG promotes synergetic efforts on applying agent technology to telecommunications. It is expected to establish new cooperation between both researchers and telcos in the area mentioned above, but also to tighten contacts and focus dispersed research and development efforts. Agent technology is to be investigated as to how it can be usefully applied to the area of telecommunications applications and telematics services. Specifically, the following goals are to be pursued: * identification and analysis of the telecommunications requirements for an open, scalable agent platform; * identification and analysis of telecommunications applications and telematics services where agent technology can add substantial value as opposed to other, more conventional technologies. These applications and services include o service and network management; o mobility supporting services; o electronic commerce. * Identification and analysis of requirements for an infrastructure for agent-based applications and services; * analysis of a methodology for agent-oriented software development for telecommunications applications and telematics services. Activities The IATA SIG activities will include: * a SIG web site covering information on IATA-related research and development activities, especially in Europe. * provide regular information on IATA and IATA SIG activities to related EU-funded research projects, e.g. ACTS-CLIMATE; * regular meetings of SIG members for discussions on the problems of establishing agent technology in telco industry, as well as potential solution paths for reaching this aim. Such meetings can serve as a central point where telco industry can present current problems and researchers can present solutions, and feedback in both directions can flow easily; * joint projects and collaboration among the SIG members aiming at a comprehensive methodology for agent-oriented software development for telecommunications and telematics services; * cooperation with groups and all events with topics related to the R&D of IATA, such as interdisciplinary workshops, conferences, meetings in the research areas mentioned above (IATA workshop series, PAAM, IJCAI, ICMAS, ...). Motivation Agent technology is a very promising approach to address the challenges of modern day telecommunications. The existing world of telecommunications which is deeply influenced by monopolistic public network operators (PNOs) is currently changing at a rapid pace. This change is taking place in the technological as well as the regulatory arena. Additionally, market forces on an unprecedented scale are at work. Given these circumstances it will no longer be sufficient for PNOs to solely provide network infrastructure. The challenge for PNOs consists in evolving to full-service providers. This implies that on the one hand increasingly complex telecommunications infrastructure needs to be managed more efficiently and, on the other hand, that new types of telecommunications services need to be developed and provided. It is in particular such future services that need to satisfy a diverse range of requirements, e.g. personalization, support for user mobility, on-demand combination of different services, offline/online service usage etc. Agent technology addresses these requirements particularly well as opposed to other technologies, e.g. client-server, stationary agent can reside on agent platforms in the net, providing various types of services. Besides being potentially decentralized and cooperative, these stationary service provider agents possess capabilities for issues such as security, accounting and billing etc. On the client side, agent-based services will be requested by means of small, mobile agents which may enable both offline and online service usage. Agent technology is very well supported by the language Java and corresponding Java APIs. IATA SIG Coordinator Dr. Sahin Albayrak DAI-Labor - Sun Technology Research Excellence Center for Intelligent Agents in Telecommunications Department for Computer Science Technical University of Berlin Sekr. FR6-7 Franklinstr. 28/29 D-10587 Berlin Germany Phone +49 30 314-24943 Fax +49 30 314-21799 Email sahin@cs.tu-berlin.de URL http://dai.cs.tu-berlin.de/sahin Interested SIG Members Deutsche Telekom - Jens Meinkoehn British Telecom - Hyacinth Nwana, Steve Corley France Telecom - Michel Plu Telefonica I&D - Francisco Garijo Nippon Telephone & Telegraph - Fumio Hattori ----------------------------------------------------------------------